Hungarian Americans (Hungarian: amerikai magyarok) are Americans of Hungarian descent. The constant influx of Hungarian immigrants was marked by several waves of sharp increase. A significant percentage of Americans identifying their ancestry as Hungarian are of specifically Hungarian Jewish descent.

Contents

Europeans have long settled in the New World, with Hungarian Americans such as Michael de Kovats, the founder of United States Cavalry, active in the American Revolution. Hungarians have maintained a constant state of emigration to the United States since then; however, they are best known for three principle waves of emigration.

St. Stephen Hungarian Church in Birmingham, Toledo, Ohio

Agoston Haraszthy, who settled in Wisconsin in 1840, was the first Hungarian to permanently settle in the United States[2] and the second Hungarian to write a book about the United States in his native language.[3] After he moved to California in the Gold Rush of 1849, Haraszthy founded the Buena Vista Vineyards in Sonoma (now Buena Vista Carneros) and imported more than 100,000 European vine cuttings for the use of California winemakers. He is widely remembered today as the "Father of California Viticulture" or the "Father of Modern Winemaking in California."[4]

A statue Lajos Kossuth stands on 113th & Riverside Drive in Manhattan, New York

The first large wave of emigration from Hungary to the United States occurred in 1849-1850 when the so-called "Forty-Eighters" fled from retribution by Austrian authorities after the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. Lajos Kossuth gave a seven-month speaking tour of the U.S. in 1851-52 to great acclaim as a champion of liberty, thereby unleashing a brief outburst of pro-Hungarian emotions. He left embittered because his refusal to oppose slavery alienated his natural constituency, and his long-term impact was minimal.[5] By 1860 there 2,710 Hungarians lived in the U.S. of whom at least 99 fought in the Civil War. Their motivations were not so much antislavery as a belief in democracy, a taste for adventure, validation of their military credentials, and solidarity with their American neighbors.[6]

St. Stephen Hungarian Roman Catholic Church in Toledo, Ohio

During the last decades of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century, the United States saw an immigration boom primarily of Southern and Eastern Europeans, among them approximately 650,000-700,000 ethnic Hungarian speakers. Unlike the educated classes who formed the core of the 1849 wave, the second Hungarian wave was mostly poor and uneducated immigrants seeking a better life in America.

Hungarian Reformed Church Fairport Harbor, Ohio

An increase of immigration from Hungary was also observed after World War II and The Holocaust, a significant percentage of whom were Jewish.

The circumstances of the third wave of emigration had much in common with the first wave. In 1956, Hungary was again under the power of a foreign state, this time the Soviet Union, and again Hungarians rose up in revolution. Like the revolution of 1848, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution failed and led to the emigration of 200,000 "56-ers" fleeing persecution after the revolution, 40,000 of whom found their way to the United States.

According to the 2010 US Census, there were 1,563,081[1] persons of Hungarian ancestry in the United States as of 2006, with − according to 2000 census data − 1,398,724 of them indicating Hungarian as their first ancestry.[7] Estimates of the number of Hungarian Americans in the United States exceed 4 million, but also include the large number of ethnic Hungarian immigrants most of whom have emigrated from Romania, Czechoslovakia, or the former Yugoslavia.

1 Poles came to the United States legally as Austrians, Germans, Prussians or Russians throughout the 19th century, because from 1772-1795 till 1918, all Polish lands had been partitioned between imperial Austria, Prussia (a protoplast of Germany) and Russia until Poland regained its sovereignty in the wake of World War I.